


All Manner of Thing

by midrashic



Category: Sunless Sea
Genre: Caretaking, Character Study, Fallen London, Fallen London Spoilers, Gen, Mortality, Yuletide 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-08-22 23:44:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16607696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midrashic/pseuds/midrashic
Summary: You don't have to like someone to be bound to them. In the last days of the First Curator, someone listens.





	All Manner of Thing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dottore_polidori](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dottore_polidori/gifts).



> Rated T for graphic descriptions of injury (burns).
> 
> Warnings: major character death implied, eldritch horrors.
> 
> dottore_polidori, I hope and pray that this is everything you wanted.

On Wednesdays, the Obsequious Steward emerges from the dust-choked air of the First Curator’s manse and walks the three colourless, endless blocks to the Vengeance of Jonah. He sits at the same table, protected from the elements and the uncaring vastness of the Neath-roof above, and watches the variously swaddled and wrapped sacks of flesh toddle past. He orders a weak cup of Khangian tea and sips it slowly, waiting out the afternoon rush. The dead don’t need to eat, but they like to, creatures of habit that they are, soup stains on bandages holding jaws to skulls, mushroom wine on the folds of fabric that pass for lips for those whose mouths have already crumbled away. He’s known the Harried Waiter for years, since before the Vengeance of Jonah was the Vengeance of Jonah, back when it served “tuna” tartare and admiral’s pie instead of pickled megalops claws in lemon brine and bat soufflé—fresh-caught daily. The Harried Waiter nods his way as he bustles past, a tray in one hand and two dishes balanced on the other, and that’s how the Obsequious Steward knows he hasn’t been forgotten.

Wednesdays are when the new archival material is brought in, and after he and the First Curator spend the morning sorting through the detritus created by another week, the First Curator falls into a fitful nap and the Obsequious Steward is free at last to wander the borough where he has lived for long years, perhaps edging into decades, and yet seen so little of. The Hollow Temple, the Lamplighters’ Arcade. He knows of them, but most of his experience with Venderbight lies with the—man? perhaps creature—that spends its days in his care. Then again, it’s not his job to know the narrow, winding streets or the dusty shops or the rickety boarding houses. It is only his job to care for the mind that does, for as long as he can. For as long as it lasts.

On Wednesdays, the Obsequious Steward goes to meet his only friend and sips a cup of lukewarm tea that tastes like tiger spit and cardamom. He waits for the press of bodies, the staleness-under-antiseptic scent of bandaged wounds, to die down so that the Harried Waiter can collapse in front of him with a bowl of mushroom chowder or jade-speckled ham. He watches the people of Venderbight, with their trivial problems and their eternal grudges as they go about their business, with no idea that one day everything they are will be carefully, meticulously recorded by a pair of shaking hands withered from age and hard use. He watches the dust rise up around him in ineffable patterns. He watches the false-stars wheel by.

Over lunch, the Harried Waiter always apologises. In a little joke, the Obsequious Steward always replies, “Not to worry, my friend. Time makes waiters of us all.”

— ☸ —

The First Curator was old already when the Third City began to topple, began its slow slide into the dark heaving breast of the earth. He was an explorer once, one of a contingent of broad-shouldered men with high foreheads and neatly arranged hair sent to map the shifting runnels and architecture of the world below so that the god-kings of H-------- might know the consequences of signing a city over to Hell. He descended in a group of twenty men. Five went mad. One went something worse than mad. Nine were killed off—by the zee-monsters, by the sweet poisonous fruit, by each other, by the sharp-eyed denizens already flourishing in the dark, by the fear. Three vanished into the night. He supposes they might still be alive somewhere. He’s seen unlikelier things happen. Within eight months he was alone. That was fine.

He mapped the coastline with narrow skiffs, demarcated the borders between the ruins of the First City and the still-intact but crumbling mud-and-straw bricks of the Second, wondered how a people could survive without maize. He dreamed in purple-leafed forests that grew thick and lush in the light of some impossible god, no god he had ever heard of but one whose presence was unmistakable, of blue-winged birds that sounded like his warriors’ death throes. He collected feathers and round silver coins, wrapped them carefully, and sent them to the Surface. The golden burnish of his skin faded. He liked it, plunging into virgin land, knowing that wherever his sandals landed, someday his descendants would walk in his wake and own all that they could survey. He liked the claiming.

And then—

It happened in nowhere, just a rocky crag that he had perched on to make minor repairs to his canoe. He had fallen asleep over a fire that crackled the same way below as it did above and when he woke up he was burning, the cotton _pati_ draped over his shoulder alight, his sandals smouldering on his feet. A freak wind. A curse. He screamed and ran, ran for the zee, ran for the blessed touch of frigid water on his skin, but the flames were in his hair now and his skin was peeling off and the clearing where he had slept was only steps away from the coastline but he ran and ran and never got any closer. Finally in desperation he dropped to the dirt and rolled, sobbing in pain. The fire blazed out eventually when he failed to feed it. He lay there for—who knew? Days, perhaps. Wishing to die. Waiting to die. To join his men and his wife and anyone else he had ever lost.

Where do the souls of those who die in Hell go?

He didn’t die, but he didn’t heal. He was the first, he thinks. The first to, with shaking, blackened fingers, tear his blanket into strips and wind them around his melted flesh so that he wouldn’t have to see the char, the horrible weeping wounds that would not close. He had seen this before. One of his men had received a stab wound that should have been fatal from a hooked blade wielded by a man wearing an ornate bird mask. At night, they had lain together and, guided by the dead man’s hand, the man who would become the First Curator would trace the gaping slit with his fingers, wondering. Then the dead man had been swallowed by a smiling, flat-featured fish the size of a house and it became a moot point. So he was not the first to discover that fatal injuries lingered. He might have been the first to be so disgusted by the sight that he hid the truth of his nature away under cloth and knots, cotton and sisal.

It was a trap, he discovered eventually. A place where space doubled in on itself. He could keep walking for centuries and never reach the shore. He spent—a long time there, on that nameless jut of rock. When the Third City Fell and the men exploring their new home at last discovered him, weak and ragged, living in a place beyond death, the god-king he had left the sunlight world for had died and his son ruled in his stead. They recognised him eventually. The last of the lost expedition to Hell. Glazed with the memory of the sun fresh on their skin, they lifted him up, protected from whatever cruel god-tricks that had trapped him there, and carried him back to the man who was now the Presbyter. But he had no place in their glorious country, this cabal of fiercely bright priests and warriors that he hardly recognised, these men who had bartered their city away and eaten a god. They could not stomach it, these near-immortals. To be reminded so well of the fate that awaited them still. They sent him away. They sent him away, poor death-eaten thing, they built him a mausoleum and left him there to rule over dust and corpses.

But his sacrifice had not been without remuneration. They did not know it, but they had placed the city—the true city, not the silk-skin facsimile of what it was to live in the dark—in his hands. They had made him the First Curator of Metnal.

— ☸ —

The Obsequious Applicant was led down the hallway by a tomb-colonist, young and relatively unmarred as these things went, just a rakish bandage tied around her head to hide the gaping skull-wound that had sent her here. The First Curator’s manse was dark and cavernous, a hodgepodge of many different architectural styles as wings and extensions had been added on over the years. The Obsequious Applicant followed his guide through the winding maze of corridors. Anyone else might have been hopelessly lost.

The tomb-colonist cracked open a heavy stone door at the end of a particularly dim hallway. “No light,” she explained. “No moths.” The Obsequious Applicant nodded as if he understood, as much as a silk-skin could understand these things. He slipped through the crack and emerged into a study, dark as a moonless night above, lit only by lamp-lighter bees. The musty scent of dry decay, of mummification, drifted out towards him. Something stirred on a low divan. A voice like rushes scraped over stone wafted up from the tiny slumped figure. “Who…?”

The Obsequious Applicant bowed his head. He knew how to be obliging. “Sir. I understand we’ll be working together closely in the coming days.”

“Thankless… job,” the Curator wheezed. “My needs… many. Time is short.”

“Oh, I’m sure I’ll find some compensations.”

“Not Neathborn,” the Curator observed.

“No.”

“What do you miss… about the Surface?”

The Obsequious Applicant thought for a moment. “Colours,” he said finally. A dry, crackling sound came from the couch. The Obsequious Applicant realised that the Curator was laughing.

“The bandages. On the table.”

The Obsequious Applicant knelt by the low table and felt for the bandages scattered there. They were an array of materials, quality, ages—blood-caked brightly patterned silk and sturdy frayed canvas, new-feeling smooth linen and plain ragged muslin. “They must be Archived,” the Curator said slowly, effort straining every word. “The correct… directory. Martha Kneeves, Surface-born, sent to the Grand Sanatorium. Altan Batbayer, Khanate, sent to the Grand Sanatorium. Kirke Devonshire, Neath-born. Emerged.”

The Obsequious Applicant nodded, each name and fate already engraved in his memory. “I dictate,” the Curator rasped. “You, my eyes. Ensure they are stored… correctly.”

He bundled the bandages that were all that remained of three once-people into his arms and nodded. “Will there be anything else, sir?” he asked.

“Blanket.”

The Obsequious Steward tucked the thing that was the First Curator in and left. That was the first day.

— ☸ —

When the Fourth City fell, the First Curator had already started to wither. It wasn’t like decay, that mysterious process of turning flesh to soil and bone. His skin—what was left of it—sagged and cracked, but the semblance of limbs remained. He could feel his skeleton turning brittle and delicate, but he could still move, slowly, painstakingly; still catalogue the last remnants of the residents of the city, his City. The new Neathers brought their tortoise sculptures and terraces, pavilions and palaces. The city once again rose up around him, stone taking the place of brick, and the Curator had new charges to attend to.

He had been so lonely. The Presbyter found the secret to escape his fate, and bestowed that gift upon his once-people. They did not come to him anymore, for solace before the Grand Sanatorium or for comfort before Emergence; they lived their thousand years and died. He tried not to think about it. He buried himself in the newcomers and their _stories_ , of the exhilarating rigour of being on horseback for hours or days on end, of the clear blue of the sky he could hardly remember and the feeling of sunlight slanting across one’s cheeks. Every bandage was a story, and they spoke to the First Curator: of elaborate staged theatrical events, a bright tune on a horsehead fiddle, beauty and art from every corner of the world flourishing in the crossroads of this city.

With the new residents came new looks, new expressions of horror when they realised what he truly was, the spectre of their own fates made vivid and unbreathing. He had grown used to it long ago. He did his work well, staying aloof from the push and pull of the rhythms of life-after-life around him, remembering dimly the sun-soaked world he had left behind that grew dimmer every moment. The passage of time trickled for him, every day a small eternity of suffering, the years and decades blending together. Did it matter when he had last left the manse? When he had last changed his bandages? He lay suspended in a vacuum of timelessness, contented, maybe. The bandaged visages around him changed, from hemp and cotton to silk and felted wool. He remained.

He sometimes wondered why he could not seem to die. He eventually came to the conclusion that he just hadn’t felt like it so far, and probably would not until he was truly dust and insects, and nothing else.

The halcyon days did not last. Slowly, the numbers dwindled, then slowed to a trickle. What had become the Khanate was a small holdout of the once-teeming streets of the Fourth City. The curator waited as the decades passed into centuries. He could not wait forever. He was shrinking beneath his bandages, bone loss and desiccation taking their toll. Perhaps he could wait long enough.

The Masters were restless. Soon, a new city. Soon, a new kind of dead.

In spite of himself, the First Curator lived (”lived”) to see the Fifth City fall.

— ☸ —

On one day like all the others, the First Curator rasped out, “Tell me about you.”

They chatted, to fill the time. The First Curator knew too well that time spun on, regardless of whether one wanted it to or not. But this was the first time it had asked so plainly. The Obsequious Steward paused where he had been dusting the chaise and thought. The lamplighter-bees buzzed overhead.

“I was born on the Surface,” he began, “but you knew that already.”

“There is… a taste about you. Light… clings to your skin.”

“Yes. Well. Before the fall, my parents were morticians. I suppose I preferred the company of the dead to the company of the living even then. So, Venderbight.”

“The corpses do not… frighten you? Your fate reflected in those around you?”

“Everyone dies,” the Obsequious Steward says. “Even you.”

The First Curator closed its eyes. It looked like something was paining it, but that was nothing new; its existence was pain, the slow decaying pain of a toothache, of sepsis. The Obsequious Steward finished dusting and moved on to collecting the blankets for the Imperious Laundress and her ilk. Strange how her expression could pierce through anyone who gave her cheek, even through the bandages.

— ☸ —

The work of the First Curator is vast and never-ending. Every remnant of every tomb-colonist, no mattered how battered, no mattered how long ago they had ceased true existence, found its way to the First Curator’s withered, permanently curled hands. The Archives of Venderbight were not like Scrimshander, which greedily sucked in every scrap of every story that passed through its forsaken bone walls. The First Curator’s work was what was left when even bone had crumbled.

It begins with neatly pressing the bandages out, removing the wrinkles and folds of someone’s nose or elbow. Then, a gentle wash. The material is catalogued: weave, texture, fineness. Then, information about the person to whom it had once adorned. Manner of death, time spent as a tomb-colonist, manner of final death. That is all that was necessary. Even the great names like Feducci will garner no more attention than the humblest hermit; it will all be forgotten anyway. Death is spiteful like that. When properly recorded in the master book, the bandages are shelved, wrapped in fine archival paper and sorted neatly according to an arcane system only the First Curator is privy to.

(The First Curator is not sure why he began collecting bandages. Certainly no one told him to do it; the Presbyter would as well have forgotten about him altogether. But when the first denizens of the city under his aegis began to fade, it seemed wrong that they would not continue in some fashion. And the fire had changed him. Now, when he touched the bandages, he could _see_ the thing that lingered on when souls wisped away to… wherever it was they went.)

The Archives are a library of most every life that ever flickered in the Neath like a guttering candle. In every bandage, a remnant. A memory, perhaps. The taste of snow on the tongue, or the nuzzle of a friendly bat to one’s fingers. A moment of a life that is itself only a moment in eternity. This is the First Curator’s work, and he has never left it.

— ☸ —

On more melancholy days, they talk about things long gone. The First Curator never mentions who it had been when it was alive, but everything that came after was food for conversation. The Obsequious Steward never speaks about who he had been before he had come to the Neath, but everything that came after was fair game. They tell second- and third-hand stories about the wonders of the worlds, both above and below. They talk about people they had once known, people that had once been. They talk about colour.

“The way things would glisten so brightly you could almost taste them.”

“Dyes. Tinctures. Paints.”

“The smell of green in spring, the dazzle behind your eyelids, freshwater blues like the sky.”

“The white of the false-stars. Green of zee-scum. Orange… of candle-flame.”

“Colour words. Azure. Viridian.”

“Viric. Viric… dancing on the hull.”

The Obsequious Steward said nothing. There were things about the Neath that, for all his long time spent down here, he was still not privy to.

“My own colours. Reflection.” A shuddering sigh, more like the wisp of wind across water than anything else. “Things… long gone.”

The Obsequious Steward did not mention that colour was not gone from the world, if only the First Curator would be carried outside to look. The First Curator never left its study. And within those walls is only darkness.

— ☸ —

It came to the First Curator all at once, years and years after the Obsequious Steward had first come to him. The Steward’s manner, too calm for a man who had never been exposed to caprice and unpredictability and learned to stake his roots in the soil and stand firm against it. The stories about his childhood which seemed to have taken place both long ago and just yesterday. The tattoo of a many-spoked wheel behind his ear. For a long time, though, the First Curator stayed silent, observing. He did not think _he_ was the Obsequious Steward’s assignment—his work, for all its importance, was largely overlooked by the silk-skinned purveyors of the Great Game. But whatever he was doing in Venderbight, surely he had finished his work long ago.

He asked him on a night when the lamplighter-bees’ buzz was more subdued than usual, which he had discovered, back when he could still walk in the open air without fear of moths, corresponded to clear but chill nights. The Obsequious Steward paused in his nightly feeding of the bees. “It’s true,” he said. “I was sent here to investigate the Grand Sanatorium. Even spies fear where they go when they die.”

“More than most,” the First Curator rasped out. He had never been a wall-whisperer himself, but he’d been an explorer, which he thought was close enough. “Why you?”

“I like the dead more than the living, as I said. It makes for some interesting assignments. And yes, I concluded a decade or so ago that infiltration of the Grand Sanatorium would require several strategically placed and particularly zealous agents and more resources than my… than would be wise.”

“Why stay?”

“I stayed for you,” the Obsequious Steward said, so simply, as if staying where not a kindness the First Curator had been deprived of for centuries as new faces, bandaged and not, passed him by. “It’s not long now, is it?”

“No… not long.”

“I thought I’d stay. For as long as you needed me.”

The First Curator was long past withered enough to no longer feel things like tears or heartache. “Your employer?”

“ _You_ are my employer, sir,” the Obsequious Steward said gently. “Here. Let me change your bandages.”

— ☸ —

“There’s a place, deep within the jungles of the Elder Continent, where the sapphires sing. Not like the Blue Prophets or Milliner Bats, genuine song, high and sweet and lovely. You can kneel down into the rivers of blue and scoop up a handful and hold them to your ear and they will pulse with music, a different tune for every stone, but somehow all vibrating in harmony. I tried to bring some back, once, but when you leave the clearing the stones stop singing. Yet sometimes I think I can hear them. If I fall asleep with the stone under my pillow, I can hear them in dreams.”

“They call it the Avid Horizon now, but when I knew it it was Can Tzicnal’s Teat. Nothing beautiful there… we lost two men. Not prepared for the cold. Wolves the size of crocodiles… jaws that could swallow you. But they did not eat. They prowled. Starving. Ribs showing. They lived off frost and ice alone. Our man tried offering one salted pork… it looked at him like it didn’t know what to do. That was not what killed him.”

“North of where the Cumaean Canal spits you out, there is a city that rests on the water. I was stationed there for a time. The buildings rise up out of the sea like half-drowned things. The people there are always wet, hair plastered to their bodies, clothes soaked to the skin. They have no need for walks or boats. They swim like others tread water. Perhaps they live in the half of the city that is buried underneath the surface of the water, another kind of Neath. It is the birds that strike you, when the canals are still and the people silent. Scoters and loons and grebes. Where do they roost? What is it like, to be half a creature of water, half of air?”

“Monstrous creatures… you cannot even imagine unless you have spent time at sea. At zee. Serpents with the faces of women. Spectres that haunt the prow… A great winged thing, fluttering above. As large as if fish had swallowed men. We caught a long black thing with our nets and spears… it thrashed in the air. We waited for it to die. It took a long time. It did not scream. I remember. It did not gasp like most fish. It just writhed… in silence… against the blunt sides of our spears. We waited for it to die. It took a long time.”

“Fruits grow on the Surface so sweet that the taste lingers in your mouth for hours after. Red-and-yellow dense fruits that crunch against your teeth. Segmented fruits that burst into flavor on your tongue. Berries. I miss berries. Small and sour and so ripe in the summer.”

“Large spiky plants that spit out a large spiky fruit. Yellow. Tender. Like sunshine in your mouth.”

And on. And on.

— ☸ —

On the last Wednesday, the Obsequious Steward emerged from the shadows and stale air of the First Curator’s manse and walked the three grey, ashen blocks to the Vengeance of Jonah. He ordered his weak cup of Khangian tea and let the bustle and raucous of midday rush at a local secret swirl around him. He waited longer than usual, but not by much. The tea was down to its dregs when someone dropped into a chair across from him.

“I see you here often,” a man in a toque draped with bandages said. “A connoisseur?”

“Just a friend with particular tastes in tea.”

“Mm, I see. It does not bother you? To wait and wait for an uncertain reward?” the Bandaged Poissonnier asked.

The Obsequious Steward intuited that they were no longer talking about the Harried Waiter and his many, many duties. For all that he did not get out much, he was well-known throughout Venderbight as the First Curator’s errand boy. The First Curator, of course, was whispered about in the hushed corridors and darkened alleys, tall tales swapped for blatant mythmongering, the dead making meaning of their inevitable end-beyond-ends, wondering what could ever make them stop clinging so tenaciously to life and accept the Sanatorium or Emergence, as all tomb-colonists, aside from one, inevitably did. “It has its compensations,” he said simply.

“Like good food and good wine,” the Poissonnier said jovially.

“Exactly so.” In spite of himself—perhaps a part of him had known it was the last Wednesday, perhaps he had just been lonely—the Obsequious Steward hesitated before saying, “I find that some people are better suited for it, waiting. I am one of them.”

“Ah,” the Bandaged Poissonnier said, “but time makes waiters of us all, does it not?”

— ☸ —

On the night before the zee-captain returns for the last time, bearing ink of many eye-searing and memory-stamping colours or a burnt-honeycombed spore that glows with something much older and vaster than the light of the sun, the Obsequious Steward kneels down and begins to undo the First Curator’s bandages, one by one. The Curator is nearly motionless. Around him glow six objects in impossible shades. The lamplighter-bees have been dispensed with; the halo of many-coloured light spread by precious treasures from across the zee is enough to see by.

“Let me,” the Obsequious Steward says, and does not quite explain what exactly the First Curator is meant to let him do. He undoes the bandages, one at a time. Lifts the Curator’s wizened feet, barely more than scraps of skin clinging to the dry and brittle bone, and raises a soft wet cloth to them. On the last night, the Obsequious Steward washes the First Curator’s feet in silence, the air around them alight with tints and hues neither of them can describe, had ever hoped to see again. The soft motion of being bathed. The Obsequious Steward’s breaths so loud they drown out the Curator’s tiny huffs of air.

A memory floats up to him, not dulled by centuries but by the simple mist of forgotten childhood. A stream, the cacophonous laughter of small children, a warm touch pouring water over his head.

A memory floats up to him, not suppressed by decades of intelligence work, decades spent being someone else, but honest and clear. The first master for whom he’d done this, the eve of his initiation into his secret order. The woman who had wriggled her toes at him flirtatiously and later seared the first of many tattoos onto his thigh.

Afterwards, the Steward wraps new, clean bandages around his feet and ankles. He kisses the wrinkled wound of each foot. Leans his head against the First Curator’s divan. Says nothing. They have already said everything to each other.

The First Curator sighs, just a wisp of breath trickling out between bandages, and waits. Feels the passage of time rub against his rough linen near-skin. Feels the beat of wings against his still-stilling heart.

**Author's Note:**

> I am an adherent of the idea that the Third City is the Mayan city of Hopelchén. As a Mayan elite, the First Curator would probably have burned the hair on his forehead to draw back the hairline and emphasize his profile.
> 
> Metnal is the Yucatan Mayan name for the underworld. Can Tzicnal is the Mayan god of, among other things, the North.
> 
> Comments are lovely but concrit is lovelier. If you like my work and want to support me, buy me a coffee.


End file.
